Causes and Cures for the Dysfunctional Church

The church in America today is in trouble. True to His word, the Lord begins His judgment in His house (II Peter 4:17) and moves from there to judge a nation. Over the last twenty years, ministry after ministry has come under great scrutiny and fire for sexual immorality, financial impropriety, skewed doctrine, lavish lifestyles, and countless other issues. God has truly been shaking His church and exposing the dysfunctionality of today’s church.

What we have seen and what we have experienced by the shaking has left us asking some difficult questions: Where has the glory (God’s glory)gone in the American church? How did the simple, pure gospel of the Savior become about “me,” “my,” and “mine”? What happened to the transparency, integrity, and even the vulnerability that has marked the church for centuries when following Christ meant hardship, denial, and even death?

Dysfunctional may be defined as “deviating from normal behavior.” In Pastor Larry Stocksdale’s latest book The Remnant, he describes five primary dysfunctions of the American church and what God’s Word says is the cure for each of these causes. Over the next few days, we will take a look at these and I sincerely believe your spirit will bear witness with what God is saying to us through this great book.

#1 Dysfunction: The Unfathered Church
Pastor Stocksdale points to “a lack of fathering” as the primary reason for ministerial instability and failure within the church today. Mentoring and fathering is a basic human need, and those in the ministry are not exempt from it. Even Jesus needed the affirming word from heaven: “You are my son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11, NIV). Unfortunately, many pastors across our nation experience a general lack of affirmation and mentoring.

Stocksdale writes, “I have met hundreds of pastors that suffer from a father wound. Until recently the term was new to me, but it is at the heart of the issue affecting the deepest recesses in the souls of men. This wound first occurs when a boy does not sense affirmation because of an absent, anonymous, or abusive father.”

John Eldredge, in his powerful best seller, Wild at Heart, points out that the father wound produces posers: men who wrestle with the question of whether they have what it takes to be a man. When a man lack’s his father’s affirmation, he either becomes passive(fearful of new challenges) or aggressive (focused on affirmation by achievement). Eldredge goes on to say that a woman cannot truly affirm a man. She can encourage him but she cannot answer the question of his manhood that rests within his soul.

The Cure: Government and Mentoring Through the Apostle Gifting
Pastors need spiritual fathers. The early church did not develop a bureaucratic, hands off oversight that only inspected properties and counted noses and nickels. They had overseers and elders who provided a mentoring structure to affirm, advise, and correct, when necessary. Church government flows from an environment of affirmation, validation, and acceptance operated by season spiritual fathers as thought they were as sons.

This is the hope for the future of the church in America…that pastors find spiritual mentors who will affirm and validate. From there, pastors must set up structures in their congregations where spiritual mentors affirm and validate their young men and sons in the faith. The early church was healthy because of spiritual mothers and fathers that gave godly advice and were godly examples. No, it’s not too late, but now is the time to confront and correct the “great father wound” in the church today.